Greg's journal

This weekend, man. Holy shit this weekend. To say the absolute least, it’s been a journey, and all from a few psychological thrillers I watched. But I digress. I really can’t say enough good things about the anime Future Diary, but I have resolved that I’m going to keep this post as spoiler free as possible. I will say, however, Future Diary is a mature anime. I don’t mean you have to be over a certain age to watch it or enjoy it, though it is a 18A show; what I mean is that in order to get into it, you have to be okay with a gritty, basically uncensored, version of the world. Things are bloody and messy, people are complicated and don’t explain every motivation, and the world, well the world certainly has a lot of happiness to be had, even in the darkest of places, but for most of the characters in this show, it all stems from darkness. So if you’re down for anime that likes to fuck with everything you know and love about anime and your mental and emotional well being, keep reading.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before in any of my posts, but when I play a game, I try to play my first run of the game without a walkthrough. I go in as blind as possible. Mainly, I do this because I relish in the feeling I get when I accomplish something completely on my own merit. If there’s a difficult puzzle or challenge in a game, it feels all the more rewarding when conquered with your own knowledge and abilities. It’s kind of the same feeling I get from beating games on Hard Mode, despite that Hard Mode can be bullshit sometimes (here are my thoughts on that matter). ​

I should tell you, I’m not the biggest fan of reviews, especially about video games. I find that reviews rarely give an accurate insight into whether I would personally enjoy something and furthermore, I’m not a fan of unchecked criticism. Recently, I’ve noticed a particular review of video games has become a prevalent critique online.

​It can be said in many different ways, but basically it boils down to something like, “this game is too easy because it’s too easy to break the game.” ‘Breaking the game’ in this case is usually attributed to exploiting a design flaw in the game.

First and foremost, older games aren’t inherently better than newer games. Sure, we have our nostalgia and back in the way back, you most likely only had a handful of games to play over a year or two. When I was a kid I only really got new games for Christmas and occasionally my birthday. It meant I was typically playing one game for a lot longer than what I do these days. These days I have a stacks of games sitting on my shelf and half of which I haven’t even played yet. I, like most, I’m sure, have every intention of burning through all those games, but, for me anyways, Rainbow 6:Siege came out, and well, I kind of got hooked.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how writers are kind of like serial killers and in light of recent developments in pop culture, I wanted to revisit the topic. In my previous post (you can read it here), I drew the comparison that writers who kill their characters have an M.O. of how they murder. Their M.O. turns into a pattern, and thus, they’re kind of like serial killers. But really, in literary terms, this “pattern” is actually just foreshadowing. It’s a critical part of storytelling and is often one of the hardest aspects to grasp when creating a story. I’ve read and watched a lot of fiction where creators have confused foreshadowing for foreboding.

So, Shift has been on a little bit of a hiatus the last couple weeks, and as a reward for peoples’ patience while we get ourselves sorted, here is a preview to Shift #2.

​Asphalt and sand stretched from horizon to horizon. Cacti were spattered about the desert, but despite the hazy greenery, the land was barren; which made the truck stop just a few meters from the road all the more desirable. It was a man-made oasis in the sea of extinction. During the day, the stretch of road was boring, arid, and hot, but at night, it was cold, treacherous and even slight curves could kill. The desert had way of absorbing everything: water, thought, life. It would all soak into the sand and disappear forever.

Imagine if scientists perfected the process of making Spiderman and sent a hundred modified humans to Mars to do battle against hordes of mutated and evolved humanoid cockroaches. Except the group doesn’t just get modified with spider powers; some get spider powers, but each individual is given a different animal’s genes depending upon compatibility with the host’s genes. On top of that, there’s a political plot unfolding due to the mission being a joint operation that spreads across several countries. I know, sounds awesome, right?Honestly, it’s the kind of science fiction that’s right up my alley. I love the concept of terra-forming planets so that future humans can expand our scope across the galaxy. And I know that makes me sound like I’m pro-colonialism, but I’m not. I like the concept of a planet that didn’t hold life being modified in order to produce and sustain life. And that’s what Terra Formars is all about. The humanoid cockroaches that inhabit Mars were actually a part of the process of terra-forming. Unexpectedly, the roaches rapidly evolved to be akin to proto-humans, but they started as regular run-of-the-mill cockroaches; and now there’s a stage for a very intriguing story to unfold.

I love characters dying in fiction. I hate it too though. I love the realism that in a dangerous situation, you don’t know who’s going to make it and who’s going to bite it. You hope it’s not your favourite characters, but if they weren’t a possible target then the drama wouldn’t be nearly as compelling. Although after catching up on both the comics and the TV show The Walking Dead, I started to notice something with Robert Kirkman’s decisions to kill certain characters. There were patterns in his kills. Of course, sometimes it was the stereotypical pattern. You know, the rookies claiming their desire to be the best or vets talking about how they want to spend their future once this is all over. Those characters are just begging to be the victim of some terrible fortune. And for the most part, Kirkman doesn’t rely on those tropes. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a pattern for when he’s going to kill one or many of his characters. That’s when it hit me. Writers who kill their characters are serial killers.

If we’ve ever had a conversation about a TV show or anime, you’ll know that I hate waiting week-to-week to watch a show. I don’t need the show to be entirely done when I start watching, but I need to have an arch complete before committing. I mean, sure, I’ve fallen for the trap of a friend saying that I “just have to watch it now. It’s so good.” Recently I fell for it when Is it Wrong to Pick Up a Girl in a Dungeon? and I refused to do it again, despite that show being spectacular…for this season at least. So when Billy started raving about this show Rokka: Brave of the Six Flowers, I asked one question “is the first season done?” He said “no” disappointedly and we went about our business, but the minute Billy finished the last episode, he texted me that I should watch it immediately.Now I trust Billy’s opinion. He gets a bit more emotional towards shows than I do, but just by a bit; and he does have different taste than mine, but when he adamantly recommends something to me, I trust the man.

I should preface this rant by saying that having tutorial elements in a game isn’t bullshit. However, when there’s a whole tutorial level cordoned off from the actual game, that is bullshit. The reason this particular issue is on my mind is that I downloaded Super Time Force from the Playstation Store. The big perk of the Playstation Plus account is being able to download some free games that you may not have played unless they were free. Some games are excellent, like Rocket League, and some are not so good. I hesitate to say bad because, well, I haven’t downloaded all of the games they’ve offered and the ones I downloaded were never really bad; some didn’t interest me, but that doesn’t mean someone somewhere isn’t enjoying the hell out of them. But I digress. So I downloaded the game Super Time Force, courtesy of the PS Plus account, as a trial because the game looked interesting and indie platformers have been some of the best titles in the last few years. I tried to go into the game with no expectations; I hadn’t heard anything about the game, but the trailer looked entertaining.